Art & Design

Reality Leaves a Fingerprint on the Biennial

By CAROL VOGEL

December 10, 2009

The 2010 edition of the Whitney Biennial — that giant survey of American art on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — will not only try to chronicle current goings-on in contemporary art, but it will also reflect the world at large. Thus, in these recessionary times, the show will be smaller than it has been in recent years, with just 55 artists, down from 81 in 2008 and 100 in 2006. It will also be contained in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s home, the Marcel Breuer building, rather than spilling over into a second location, as the 2008 Biennial did when it occupied much of the Park Avenue Armory or into Central Park as other Biennials have.

Next year’s event, which runs from Feb. 25 through May 30, is being organized by Francesco Bonami, 54, the Italian-born curator who helped put together the Rudolph Stingel retrospective at the Whitney in 2007, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, 29, a senior curatorial assistant at the museum who helped with the Biennials in 2004 and 2006.

On view will be a mix of well-known and new artists ranging in age from a 23-year-old photographer, Tam Tran, to the 75-year-old conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady.

Among the recognizable names will be the painter and sculptor George Condo, the Polish-born artist Piotr Uklanski and the American artist Charles Ray, whose outdoor sculpture of a boy holding a frog became an instant landmark in Venice when it was unveiled last June along the Grand Canal.

One of the Biennial’s pleasures is discovering emerging artists, and this time there will be plenty of them, including Aurel Schmidt, a draftswoman; Jesse Aron Green, a video artist; and Leslie Vance, a painter. In the lobby gallery Martin Kersels, from Los Angeles, is creating a sculptural installation that resembles oversized furniture but that will also function as a stage for programs involving artists, writers, musicians, choreographers and D.J.’s.

In a change from past years, the curators have limited each artist to one work or series, so that the Biennial will feel more like a snapshot of the state of art rather than a succession of mini-retrospectives.

And unlike the one in 2006, this Biennial won’t have a theme. Mr. Bonami said he didn’t want one: “The theme is the year — 2010 — which is the title.”

But trends inevitably emerge.

“There’s less noise around,” Mr. Bonami said, explaining that he had noticed that young artists were thinking smaller. “The new generation seems less obsessed with big. They have more human-scale attitudes.”

Both curators also said that modernism had returned as a source of inspiration. “We’re at a particular moment now where there have been drastic changes across the country, so many younger artists have been looking back to history for guidance,” Mr. Carrion-Murayari said, adding that they were using “ abstraction as a positive means of expression and are taking historical precedents and trying to make them new and fresh.”

Politics inevitably seep into some of the work. While both curators said there wouldn’t be as many political statements as in past Biennials, some artists have, Mr. Bonami said, “used their own personal experiences to explore political issues.”

The curators are planning to organize the space in a new way. “We’ve divided the museum in layers like the slice of a cake,” Mr. Bonami said.

While the fifth floor will still feature selections from the Whitney’s permanent collection, it is being rehung with work from previous Biennials. Still on view will be many of the Whitney’s old favorites, like Edward Hopper and Milton Avery paintings. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that some of these iconic works first appeared in Biennials,” Mr. Carrion-Murayari said.

And for the first time film and video will be, for the most part, separated from other mediums, occupying the entire third floor. “We want each floor to have a different mood,” said Mr. Bonami.

Not all the curators’ plans are final. They hope to mount a project in the meatpacking district, on the site of the Whitney’s intended second home. The idea is to have the architect Jeffrey Inaba design a temporary pavilion that could be used for all sorts of events.

“It would be a signifier for the new Whitney and for things to come,” Mr. Bonami said. “Biennials are supposed to be a bridge to the future.”

MoMA Shares a Work

Bruce Nauman fans in New York who missed his new video work when it was shown as an offshoot of the Venice Biennale will have a chance to experience the work close to home.

On Tuesday the Museum of Modern Art’s board voted to acquire 50 percent of the American version of “Days,” with Maja Oeri, a MoMA trustee, buying the other half on behalf of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, whose collection is at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland.

In the piece visitors walk through two rows of wafer-thin white speakers playing voices that chant the days of the week. There are two versions: in English and Italian. For the English-language version Mr. Nauman said he recorded seven different voices in places like Montana, Georgia and Mexico. He then taped seven voices in Italy.

Although MoMA already has 78 works by Mr. Nauman in its permanent collection, they are mostly from earlier in his career, and few were made after 1993. “We felt it was important to continue the Nauman story into the present,” said Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator in the department of painting and sculpture.

While she said she planned to show “Days” next summer, details of how the museum will share it with the Schaulager still have to be worked out.

Kimbell Gets Bonington

A dreamy oil sketch of Venice by the 19th-century British artist Richard Parkes Bonington was acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Eric M. Lee, its director, announced this week.

Oil sketches by Bonington are rare and only a handful of American museums have any. “Even though he is not very well known, he was one of the towering figures of 19th-century landscape painting,” Mr. Lee said.

He explained that works by Bonington, whom he described as “a quintessential romantic artist,” were hard to come by because the artist died when he was only 25. The Kimbell work is a quick plein air scene of what the artist saw one day in 1826 along the Grand Canal.

The Kimbell bought the painting, “The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking Toward the Rialto,” an oil on millboard, from the Manhattan dealer Richard L. Feigen. While Mr. Lee declined to say what the museum paid or where Mr. Feigen found the painting, dealers who specialize in British art know it well and say it came from the collection of John Pomerantz, who made his money in the clothing business and is known to have been a victim of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The painting will go on view at the Kimbell on Friday, next to two other views of Venice, one by Canaletto and another by Guardi.